More details of MP

All the kids playing Simon Dice with me. They wanted to take a picture so I had them all touch their heads before I took it!


Me and Patricio in front of the little hut his family used to live in before they moved into their cement house.


Me and Aurora, the mom of Patricio and William. She is SO nice, has a beautiful smile and gifted me a handmade white scarf before leaving as a thank you. The funny thing is that it was one of two white scarves that was gifted to me, Enma also gave me a scarf very similar to Aurora´s. I´m not sure what to do with two twin scarves though when I´m trying to pack light....


Me and Suzal wearing our matching Opaca jackets!


One of our typical breakfasts: popcorn, bread, some tropical fruit, tea.

Sorry for the short details yesterday but I was a bit stressed. Let me start by telling you the wonderful story of my day yesterday before I get into the past two weeks. So after I left the hostal where I had had breakfast and then typed a bit on the computer (gosh my hands were shaking I was so excited to have internet for the first time in two weeks; I think a lack of communication only goes to make the homesickness worse so I´m feeling much much better now). I grabbed a taxi to this one intersection where a ton of busses go through. Oh before I say more, let me tell you how I got these travel plans: one of Pamelita´s friends who was her guide for the trip she took with her family is named Jean. Jean lives in Ecuador but is not originally from here. She fell in the love with the country, decided to move here and learn everything there is possible to know. When I told her that I´m going to Neverland Farm after MP, she gave me EXACT instructions on how to get from there to there. The bummer thing that I quickly learned was that I didn´t have her look at what I wrote down so the towns are my interpretation of what she said, which I found out were not the exact names...

OK so I have my little paper with instructions and have gotten to this intersection with all the busses flying by. I am told by the taxi driver to wait on this one corner, which I do for like 20-30 minutes, which is weird because there are a ton of busses and supposedly the bus I want comes every 10 minutes. Also there are a few bus stop signs on 2 different corners, neither of which is the corner I´m standing on. I even ask a young college looking student if I´m in the right place and he says yes. Well I decide to ask a police officer who is also there and he tells me that I´m actually on the wrong corner, go figure. I find the right corner, meet someone who is also waiting for the same bus to Rio Bamba and we catch it together.

OK I´m going to have to write more later because my travel buddy is going to have breakfast so I´m going to join her and write more tonight or later this morning. Sorry for the suspense!

I´m back! I don´t know how long I have because it is 8AM and my friend and I are going to share a taxi to the bus terminal/airport at 9AM, but I want to tell a bit more about my trip yesterday at least.

So I get on the bus and it is one of those nice buses that we took from Napa to Disneyland in high school. I just took my bags on with me and luckily had 2 seats to put them besides me. I told the bus driver I wanted to go to El Tambo, but he had a hard time understanding me; eventually he nodded and said, oh yeah, OK, and I sat down. After the bus starts going another employee, the driver´s helper, comes by and takes your money ($1 for me). We are traveling along watching a Jackie Chan movie in Spanish voice-over and then we stop and people get on. The buses stop whenever someone waves their hand to get on or says "gracias" and wants to get off. When the bus stops vendors get on and sell empanadas (cheap white bread with a very small amount of some filling), candy, french fries, chicken kabobs, whatever! At another stop the driver tells me to get off and get onto that bus. I don´t question him even though my instructions don´t tell me to switch buses. I get onto the next bus and wait for the money guy to come by so I can ask him where we´re headed and see if El Tambo is on our route.

It takes this money guy a much longer time to get down the aisle and when he does, he doesn´t understand where I want to go. A woman across the aisle says something else, but I don´t know if that is where I want to go either. So I just ask "where are we headed?" He says Guardara and I say OK. I look in my book and see that it is on the other side, away from RioBamba, but at least it is going south. I also see that it is on the way to Guayaquil, the second largest city in Ecuador after Quito. I decide to take a bus to Guayaquil, spend the night, and then head to Cuinca the next day (my unofficial destination before Neverland Farm; Cuinca is supposed to be a very great city that I will spend a day in, hopefully today--Saturday May 1st). So the bus to Guardara is like 2.5 hours and then the bus to Guayaquil is 5. I start my bus trip at 9:30AM or so and don´t get to Guayaquil until 4:30. This would not be so bad if it weren´t for a few things: 1. I started my trip at 4:30AM from MP, even though I woke up at 2:45 because we were supposedly leaving at 3AM, but everyone in MP is late. 2. I didn´t get off a bus for any longer period of time except to simply change buses, not even to go pee in the 8 hours or more I was on buses. 3. Since I didn´t get off the bus, the only food I had were the powerbars in my backpack and the somewhat unhealthy, questionably clean food sold on the bus by street side vendors. 4. The weather changed like NO OTHER on the trip!

I wasn´t too disappointed with taking such long bus rides because the guide book said they were beautiful routes, I got to see a lot of the countryside and I wasn´t holding anyone up so I wasn´t stressed (no one was waiting to pick me up and no one was being dragged on the adventure with me). It was a beautiful trip to Guardara, all the green rolling Ecuadorian hills and the super steep gardens along the mountains. At the top we reached a ton of fog and I was glad to be wearing my MP vest, Opacca jacket and the 2 white scarves (along with 2 long sleeve shirts, long underwear, jeans, hefty socks and my hiking boots). Guardara seemed to be a cute town but I didn´t see much of it because the bus drove us through the town, onto another street where we encountered a waiting bus that he told me was going to Guayaquil. I hopped onto that bus and sat for the next 5 hours.

Not so bad at first, still beautiful setting and they put on Planet of the Apes in Spanish, too loud though. My eyes were stinging from such an early morning wake-up, so I rested my eyes. When I opened them I was starting to get warm, but it was raining so we couldn´t open the window. Soon enough we started getting into a jungle area and thought that if we were by the Amazon, this is probably what the Amazon looks like. Lots of tropical trees along the hill with little huts alongside the road where people lived, had restaurants and lots of banana stands. The food that was sold on the bus changed to things I hadn´t seen yet in Ecuador. Then to my further surprise the weather kept getting super hot (like humid and uncomfortable) and we got down to the flat lands where there were a lot of standing bodies of water along with tall grasses. Houses were placed on stilts on this water with long walkways of rickety-looking wood out to their houses. I couldn´t believe I was still in the same Ecuador I had been in for the past month where I had worn layers and layers of clothing all the time.

I couldn´t open my window. It was stuck. And so was the one in front of it. Luckily the person across the aisle opened his so I could get some air. I then changed into a t-shirt by putting it on over my clothes and taking my other long sleeves off--I wasn´t wearing a bra but I didn´t care because it was so hot (not to say that I exposed myself but to say that it was more obvious in just a t-shirt than 2 long sleeve shirts). I noticed many things along this trip. First, the people were different. I saw a lot more African looking people than I had seen yet. Also, a lot more overweight people with bellies bulging over their jeans--in MP there were no overweight people. And as I was looking out of the bus window I realized how similar these towns on stilts looked like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But the thing is, nobody was making a big hoopla about these communities while New Orleans was all over the news as a devastating tragedy. I was thinking about the differences and decided that since this poverty and condition of living has been this way in Ecuador for so long, it is normal to them and nothing news-breaking. Also, it is extensive, not just one little part of a state, but a huge proportion of the country lives with conditions like this. Nevertheless, I couldn´t help but think they are still people and these people are living like this in both New Orleans and Ecuador, but in one place everyone is up in arms while in another no one blinks an eye.

Lastly, I thought about the size comparison between Ecuador and the US state Nevada: even though they are similar in size, if I took a 5 hour bus ride around Nevada I could probably close my eyes and not realize I went anywhere in those hours because the state is so un-exciting. While in Ecuador, 5 hour trip is like going to 3 different countries! It was quite exciting, even if I was super hot and uncomfortably tired and had to pee for the past 8 hours (bus drivers don´t make pee stops).

I met a guy on the bus who was sitting by the open window who told me about himself and how he´s spreading the word of God. Luckily I could honestly tell him that I did not have a cell phone and he could not therefore call me to share the word of God.

When I got to the bus terminal (HUGE BUS TERMINAL!!) a guy told me to be careful in Guayaquil because walking around on my own is not safe here. He was such a nice person and was just spreading caution, thankfully. I then found a taxi, showed him the hostal I wanted to go to, and after some hunting (even the book warned us that it is not the easiest hostal to find) we found Dreamkapture Hostal. I got a dorm room, met a German girl who has been surfing in Peru for the past 5 weeks and hung out. I had a migraine starting and by the time I went to bed (7:30) it was a full blown migraine, probably due to the weird eating, sleeping and drinking water schedule i had--I didn´t drink any water because I had to pee all day! We went and got some food: her a hamburger, me a taco of chicken and beans that was SO GOOD!!!! Some sort of electricity issue happened where we lost electricity for the rest of the night! No computer, no lights, no fans. It was unbelievably hot. Like sweat dripping down my back in just my shorts, flip flops and tshirt. I took a shower but soon after was back to being super hot again. After dinner, I tried to sleep. By around 10PM or so, I was asleep so I don´t know, the fan came back on along with the rest of the electricity, fortunately.

This morning I got up, had breakfast at the hostal (scrambled eggs, toast, juice and tea), went on the computer and am now going to get ready to head out. We are going to the bus terminal where supposedly there are buses to Cuenca every 30 minutes. The bus ride can either be 3.5 hours or 5.5 hours, depending on which route the bus takes, but I should be able to pick the shorter one if I just ask. So that´s what I´m going to do. I emailed the Green Spot, a hostal in Cuenca that got a great recommendation from another travel friend, so hopefully I´ll have reservations tonight. I also emailed Tina, the contact person for Neverland Farm, to let her know I´m going to hopefully be there either tomorrow or Monday. Since my schedule is flexible, if she says later in the week I could do that and just take my time at a few cities around the area. I´m looking forward to heading South though because supposedly Guayaquil is like the only hot city around! I can´t believe I´m looking forward to the cold, but there´s really nothing I want to do in this heat!

So I´m off and when I get to my next destination I will try and fill you in more on MP, since it was my life for the past few weeks--even though it feels like lightyears away right now!